Glossary Term – Person

Roger B. Taney (1777–1864) was the secretary of the treasury from 1833 to 1834, and then the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1836 to 1864. He received both nominations from Andrew Jackson, whom he strongly supported. As Chief Justice in 1857, Taney delivered the majority opinion in the landmark Dred Scott v. Sandford case, ruling that African Americans were not citizens and therefore not protected by the US Constitution.

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Teaching Resource

The tension between individual rights and a government’s need to preserve and protect national security during times of war has represented a constant theme throughout American history.

During the John Adams administration, a conflict with France resulted in the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, laws that violated the First Amendment by limiting people’s freedom to criticize the government and encouraged fear of foreigners living in the United States. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson famously responded with...

Teaching Resource

I do not...hesitate to avow before this House and the country, and in the presence of the living God, that if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people, and to abolish slavery in this District, thereby attempting to fix a national degradation upon half the States of this Confederacy, I am for disunion.

Representative Robert Toombs of Georgia, 1849

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Teaching Resource

At the beginning of the Civil War, as the number of dead increased daily, a force of opposition to the war efforts began to intensify in the Congress and in the voices of the American people. Abraham Lincoln, in an effort to silence the Southern sympathizers, or “Copperheads,” suspended the writ of habeas corpus, a clause of the Constitution that forbids unlawful imprisonment. The suspension of this clause was first mandated only in the state of Maryland due to its proximity to the capital, but in September of 1861...